1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the art of electrical connectors, and particularly to pressure contact connectors, such as land grid array (LGA) sockets, which are operable to establish and maintain electrical connection between two contact interfaces.
2. General Background
The development of the electronic industry toward the miniaturized, high-density and more reliable trends has required many electrical connectors, to be arranged in a high-density manner to keep up with the trends. Ball Grid Array (“BGA”) connectors have been widely used as the high-density interconnection between contact interfaces of separate electronic components, such as a chip and another printed circuit board, with solder balls on a surface of the connector to be heated to provide connection to at least one of the electronic components, such as the circuit board. The solder balls, however, often exhibit poor connection to the circuit board, in that they are not always suitable to overcome variations that may occur in the circuit board. Additionally, once the solder balls are soldered to provide the connections, the circuit board or chip can not be easily removed therefrom to correct any defect in the soldering formation, without reworking all of the solder balls and reflowing the ball grid array to the circuit board in another attempt to provide a more reliable connection.
Pressure connectors, such as land grid array (LGA) sockets, may offer numerous advantages over the BGA connectors regarding the above shortcomings to establish such a reliable connection between the electronic component, for example the chip, and the circuit board, by use of pressure contacts, such as formed spring contacts, that are embedded in the connector body with upper or lower contact section thereof in contact with pads formed on the surface of the chip or the board. In designing of the LGA sockets, conductive contacts have been often expected to be long enough and spring powerful enough to provide permanent and sufficient contact force requirements, especially when sizes of the conductive contacts are dramatically reduced to be held in cavities with minimized pitches arranged therebetween.